Lies & Ugliness Read online

  But Maggie was up and around again, boots clomping across the floor as she salvaged her remaining possessions worth stuffing into the duffel, apparently planning to abandon the rest. She pointed at an orange crate a few steps from him. On it sat a kiln-fired mug, its clay like serpent’s coils. “Grab that, will you?”

  He looked at her without moving.

  “Like I want to stay here tempting fate any longer? I don’t think so.” She pointed again, impatient, as though jabbing at an elevator button. “I never think I’ll mind dying very much. But then I remember how much I hate pain.”

  He checked them into a hotel downtown, with hundreds of rooms and a parking garage, twenty-four-hour room service and laundry. No one would even need to set foot outside again, if they didn’t want to.

  In the bathroom Maggie colored her hair, ridding herself of the screaming tangerine and going with brown, instead. Giving herself glum looks in each mirror. “I look like everybody else now,” she’d say. “Let the sides grow in a little, take out the earrings, and they’ll never recognize me. Because I sure don’t.”

  “You don’t have to stay,” he told her, and offered to buy her a ticket — bus or train or plane, her choice — anywhere she wanted. Family? Did she have family somewhere? Maggie only looked at him, as though envying him a redemptive ignorance.

  At least so long as he had her, Kraaft realized, he could pretend he wasn’t as desolately alone as he really was.

  “The whore below,” he tried again. “What does that mean?”

  “Just one of those things I heard somebody talking about once or twice. Not recently, maybe a year or two or longer. Way before Shawn ever showed up. Some kind of urban legend, was my take on it. Like albino alligators in the sewers. But I never knew anyone who was supposed to be it.” She curled her upper lip in disgust. “True or not, I hate the name. It’s got a real claim-staking ring to it, you know it had to be a man who came up with that one.”

  And when she told him what it was, or her understanding of it, her words fell on incredulous ears. This went beyond all limits of rationality. It was a fevered erotic dream gone grandly perverse. A nightmare conjured for the propaganda of puritans. A drug-induced vision of a licentious paradise, the Garden of Hedon.

  It was too good to be true.

  “There can’t be anything to it,” he said. But didn’t denying its possibility also mean denying any hope of Shawn’s reclamation? “It’s insane.”

  “Get off campus a little more, Professor. Plenty of places and things out there could give you a whole new appreciation of insane.”

  While insane, he amended, didn’t necessarily mean impossible.

  The whore below.

  Armed with this, Maggie said there were people she could talk to, acquaintances she could ask. But she didn’t want him along, so he was forced to play it her way. Nocturnal already, she came in around dawn most mornings, and always he would awaken, his slumber never deep to begin with anymore, and he never had to ask if there was news, nor even see her face to know there wasn’t.

  Days. One week. Two. She was using him and Kraaft knew it. If she’d had anyplace else to stay, she would already be there, cutting him away like a sixth toe. She was using him to finance her own search for Shawn, and he knew it, and knew that she knew that he knew. They could almost joke about it, compulsive to obsessive.

  “If I could,” Maggie said, “I’d cook her down and shoot her into my arm.”

  The morning she didn’t come back, he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Surely Maggie wouldn’t find Shawn, then be so cruelly ungrateful as to withhold the news. Keep Shawn all to herself, and leave him sitting in his hotel room. More likely, then, her recent past had finally caught up with her. He daily combed the Tribune and Sun-Times for news of Maggie’s body turning up, with name or without, but found no matches. Best to stay put, then, so she would know where to find him, or when she came back for her clothes. As a rational man, it was vital that he not lose sight of these things.

  Days. Two weeks. Three. Twice the hotel informed him a credit card was at its limit. He would give them another and it was clout enough. Sometimes he would call home, in case Maggie had tried him there, and listen to the answering machine until he realized the tape was full, much of it taken over by his department chairman, concerning scheduled courses with no professor. As yet untenured, Kraaft supposed now he never would be.

  He took to leaving the hotel, going out for things like toothpaste and razor blades, and sometimes he would find himself miles away with no recollection of the journey there.

  On a dozen billboards he saw the same ad for a health club, staring at it because the near-topless woman it featured had the same muscled abdomen as Shawn. Thirty feet tall and perfect, she loomed over Chicago, as unattainable as grace.

  Shawn’s mouth he saw in ads at bus stops, wet and glossy and poised over a wine bottle. Her thighs he recognized at an El train station, and they’d never looked sleeker. He tried smashing the glass covering the picture so he could lay a hand upon the image, but it was really plastic, and he was quickly rousted by a transit cop. They’d cut her up and strewn the pieces for miles, and wouldn’t even let him touch one.

  Except for that, Kraaft decided he’d rarely been happier, and went out sometimes to gloat, the watchful eye in rush hour’s hurricane. He saw thousands in a day, desperate to get from here to there and breathing poison to do it; those who looked joyful he could count on two hands. Freed of ambitions, he could see so much more clearly now. Virtually none wanted to be where they were at any given time, but dared not oppose the civilizing machines they’d created, which now rode them into the ground. Scowling, they shoved each other out of the way so they could get home and for a few hours dream of something better.

  And when Maggie at last returned, in the birth of autumn’s chilly bluster, it was by daylight, as if she had no more secrets left. She was waiting for him in the room, boots on the bed.

  “Where to find her,” Maggie said. “I wrote it down for you. Like a map. Over there on the dresser.”

  He picked the paper up. “La Salle Street Station?”

  “Who’d’ve guessed, huh?”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Like I’m doing this because I think it’ll make you happy? Not on your life. No, I want you to see her. I want you to see what she is now. I want you to see what you woke up in her.” Maggie swung herself off the bed, for a moment looking as though she intended to hit him. “I felt sorry for you, kind of. What stopped me is, I just can’t understand you. Pretending to be someone else when you have this beautiful, sensual creature all to yourself. Much less the rest. Who really brings themselves to fuck in front of other people unless they need the money?”

  “You really don’t see,” he said, “how someone can do it for love?”

  She was biting on a thumbnail, and spat the fleck at him. “I never felt like I had the luxury of choosing.” Maggie walked past him, toward the duffel that sat packed and waiting, and slapped him on the chest, very hard, a mockery of camaraderie. “I stayed down there with her for … I’m not sure how long it was. Because I thought I could … could get her to … oh, fuck it.

  “She’s yours now,” Maggie said. “Take a number.”

  He waited until late at night, for rush hour’s antithesis to leave La Salle Station as empty as he was likely to find it. With trains so few and far between, the place seemed to hold its breath in unease, as if sensing incompleteness, that without the commuting hordes it was nothing but a ruin in the making.

  Hollow, solitary, Kraaft’s clicking footsteps rode upon the hush. He was watched — an eye here, a pair there — but by none that mattered. They saw but didn’t care, much less comprehend.

  He paused at the edge of the platform, then leaped down onto the tracks, taking care to stay clear of the killing third rail. With a crunching of grit and pebbles of glass, he walked into the deeper darkness of the tunnel Maggie had specified, letting it s
wallow him in its blackened gullet.

  Thirty paces, forty — he was getting close. He took out a butane lighter and flared a yellow ball of illumination so he didn’t miss the notch along the wall. There. He stepped up onto the concrete pad, to the metal door. Only the knob reflected his light, worn shiny clean by frequent hands, greasy to the touch.

  But how readily it turned. You’d think the city would keep it locked. Perhaps they once did, while now there were newer designs.

  He found stairs on the other side, followed where they led. Lower landings presented other doors, but Maggie’s map made it clear: These were not for him.

  Every level further felt like greater descent into mystery — forget whatever prosaic origins were behind this labyrinth of cellars and passageways, and shelters built when everyone feared a holocaust of atoms. All cities, Kraaft supposed, had such nether regions, abandoned to become an inversion of the daylight world, where rejects found their level in a night that the sun never banished.

  Prior travelers had left their marks, painted names and glyphs. Beside the door that Maggie’s map indicated, he spotted an especially intricate one, curves and loops and slashes, undecipherable in its weird beauty. He wondered if there was any connection with what lay on the other side, or if its meaning would die with its artist.

  Beyond the door, then, other corridors, other bends. The brick walls weren’t as dry as he’d hoped, but this close to the Chicago River, seepage was inevitable. With fingertips he brushed them, found a cool slick film that was nearly organic. Beyond the limits of his light, red-reflecting pinpricks watched, then turned to flee. Rats inherited every kingdom eventually.

  A glow beckoned ahead, defining itself every few steps closer. Kraaft wondered if the palpable arousal that had begun to steal over him was born merely of anticipation, or if it was a power beyond him that anyone — even those with no idea what lay ahead — would feel luring them onward by the loins. He walked into it as he might walk into smoke that thickened until at last he would find the fire.

  The very walls seemed to ripple and stir, and the air itself to moan. There was great power here; it impelled and caressed and engulfed; it twined its way to the root of impulse; it stroked and seduced and enticed. He would know Shawn anywhere, just hadn’t expected to recognize her in advance of his eyes. He finished the walk in reverence for the immensities of deity and desire.

  The chamber was sepulchral, lit by the glow of softly hissing lanterns that draped the rest in undulating shadow. The throaty alto of Shawn’s groan greeted him, as well as an earthier rhythm, the meaty slapping of sweat-slick thighs.

  She lay on her back atop layers of mattresses, and while most of her was obscured by her lover, bracing himself on rigid forearms, the familiar curve of hip and side-swell of breast were the same. Her fingers clutched at thick shoulders. Her ankles were high, hooked together behind the man’s back. The soles of her feet were black with grime. Kraaft could plainly see her open cleft and the shaft of cock, pained and spellbound by the way they glistened.

  Scattered about were more than a dozen others of both sexes, awaiting a turn or come to watch. Others paid no attention at all, content to breathe the musty air and absorb. Of his entrance, few took notice at all.

  “What’s your pleasure, sir?”

  To his right, a paunchy man slouched in a chair padded with quilts. When he turned up the fuel on his lamp, Kraaft could see that the man was older than he’d expected, with a close beard gone gray, and hair combed straight back. It had been a very long time since its last washing.

  “What’s your part in … in this?” Kraaft asked him.

  “Don’t know as I have one. I just get a kick saying that whenever someone finds his way here.” He rummaged through a box at his side, came up with a sandwich. “What brings you, anyway? Dream? Intuition? Word of mouth? I’ve heard everything.”

  “I’m her husband.”

  A humoring smile crossed the man’s face, broad and heavily lined. “Heard that one too.”

  Kraaft slipped a picture from its wallet sleeve, and the man nodded at it in the lantern glow, offering his hand and giving his name as Hiram. When Kraaft’s hand was his own again, he lifted it to his nose; it stank of anchovies. It returned to his wallet and began counting out greenbacks.

  “I want … I have to…” He looked toward Shawn again, saw the heels of her feet slamming down on the small of the faceless man’s back. Saw the pale globes of her bottom straining up and down off the mattress. His hand shook. “I can pay.”

  “Put that away, do I look like anybody’s pimp to you? Pay. Christ almighty.” An aggrieved chuckle sounded in his throat, but he waved Kraaft down beside him. With no place to sit, squatting sufficed. “I guess the sun’s still coming up in the east, is it?”

  “You’ve been down here that long?”

  “Probably four months since I’ve last been topside. When the trains get scarce, like now” — he pointed overhead — “that’s another night. I’ve just been … here. Hard to turn your back and walk away from a miracle.”

  “Miracle?” said Kraaft, and if he couldn’t quite articulate its nature, he knew he’d felt it already.

  “In that time, by my guess, she’s taken more than six thousand lovers.”

  “Oh my god,” Kraaft breathed, fearing he might be ill, for the first time swamped by the true enormity of her being torn from him. Separation he could tolerate, because reunion would end it. Sharing her with others had been aphrodisiacal, because afterward they all went home. But such numbers as these went beyond conceiving. “Six thousand, that’s … impossible.”

  Hiram shook a bottle and upended it, drizzled jets of dark liquid onto his sandwich. “Unnatural maybe. But not impossible.” He showed Kraaft the bottle. “Fish sauce, what you smelled a minute ago. The Roman army carried fish sauce everywhere it went. Keeps you from getting sick in new places, even if you drink the water. Helps, down here. You look like you could use some.”

  Kraaft pushed it away.

  “Suit yourself,” Hiram said. “It’s all she does, just about. Round the clock. She hardly sleeps. People bring food, and she will eat, but it’s not a driving need.”

  “Somebody explained it to me but I don’t think I believed it, not rationally.” He tried to continue but couldn’t hold onto his thoughts.

  “That’s your problem, trying to make something rational of it. Life’s a lot richer when you can get past the rational.”

  “How did you manage to get past it?”

  “Brokered some investments a few years ago for other people’s money, and got convicted over the way I did it. And disappeared when it came time to do time.” He shook his head. “I don’t miss it. That world. Philosophers, I’ve decided, are more the creations of what they’ve given up than what they’ve learned.”

  Around them a minor trembling, as the rumble of a train’s arrival overhead was conducted down through bones of iron, skins of concrete. A pause, while it disgorged old cargo and took on new, then it rumbled along again. Kraaft imagined all the tracks leading away from the transit system’s heart, the complex geometries they made across the face of Chicago. Conduits of power, weren’t they modern versions of the ley lines of the ancients?

  Hiram flipped one hand overhead after the departed train. “You know, they build these places, mile after mile of packing in as much as they can. Stacking it up to the sky. Breeding like rats to fill everything up. Then they piss and moan how the place’ll be the death of them, drive them crazy, squeeze the juice out of them. But still arrogant enough to think they’re lords of it all. Never even consider they might’ve made something that came alive.”

  To someone who’d studied the living madness of crowds, the notion was hardly alien. Cities had long seemed to demand their murders, their savage tributes of spilled blood. Why, then, shouldn’t they demand finer pleasures, as well?

  “They build them, you said. Not we?”

  Hiram turned on him with a grimace. “You side
with who you want.”

  Shawn’s lover finished with grunts and a groan, for a moment lying slack atop her before backing out from between her upraised knees. In the interim while the next skinned on a condom, Kraaft ached with yearning as he finally saw her whole, naked, eclipsing any extreme he could’ve brought her to on his own. He saw now that her sex had been shaved. How childlike and vulnerable it seemed.

  Her arms lifted to welcome the next, and when the man’s hands went to her hips, she turned onto one side. He straddled her thigh, while Shawn lifted her other leg, bracing it high up against his shoulder. Kraaft stared transfixed by the arching of her lower spine, a moist furrow between two ridges of muscle. They soon found their rhythm, deep in the rolling of her hips.

  When Kraaft gasped, he wasn’t the only one. It hit different watchers at different times, like the first ecstatic plunge into union, enfolding from without rather than bursting from within. It surged through one and all, then surged beyond, while a warm glow settled in Kraaft’s loins.

  “Oh my god,” he whispered again. Hiram mopped his brow and nodded. “Is it like that every time?”

  “More or less.”

  “How far away can it be felt?”

  “Who knows. But then, it’s not strictly a human agency that’s sanctioned this.”

  “Shawn’s not the first, is she?”

  “First that I’ve seen. But no.”

  “What happened to the earlier ones?”

  Hiram averted his eyes. “Well, you don’t just quit one day and go back home, do you?” And this was all he would say.

  “Have you…?” Kraaft said, and nodded toward her.

  Shamefaced, Hiram shook his head. “Do yourself a favor. Shoot yourself before your prostate gets big as a lemon.” He nodded at Shawn as well. “Are you...?”

  “Disease,” Kraaft murmured. “She must be riddled with disease by now.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  But it wouldn’t matter. Even if she burned with it, perhaps he could know no greater ecstasy than to immolate himself on the pyre of her, let it ravage him to worm and bone.